Prelate Killed In Guatemala After Issuing Rights Report

Published: April 28, 1998

GUATEMALA, April 27—
A Roman Catholic bishop was reported today to have been beaten to death two days after he presented a scathing report on human rights violations committed during the country's 36-year civil war.

The prelate, Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, 75, was hit in the head with a concrete block Sunday night at his home in Guatemala City, church officials said today.

The officials said he had apparently heard a noise in the garage and had gone to investigate. Bloody tracks suggested that his assailant had dragged him across the garage.

Prosecutors said they had not determined a motive.

Bishop Gerardi was director of the Guatemala City archdiocese's human rights office. He presented his report, ''Never Again in Guatemala,'' at the city cathedral on Friday.

In it, nearly 80 percent of rights abuses in the war were attributed to the Guatemalan Army and to civilian paramilitary groups it created.

The United Nations mission chief in Guatemala, Jean Arnault, called the killing ''a violent contrast, given that Gerardi was a man who played a role in the peace process.''

The conflict, one of Latin America's longest, lasted from 1961 until the end of 1996. Leftist rebels fought the often repressive Government, demanding land reform.

The killing is the first since the December 1996 peace accord to involve a Central American church figure of such high rank.

The report issued on Friday was based on 6,000 interviews with survivors. It cited the army and so-called civilian self-defense patrols for about 80 percent of the 150,000 deaths and 50,000 disappearances in the war. Leftist rebels were cited in the document in about 9 percent of the deaths.

In a report today on the slaying, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican paper, called the bishop ''one of the most strenuous defenders of human rights during the bloody civil war.''

It said Pope John Paul II had met several times with the bishop during a 1996 papal visit to Guatemala.

Photo: Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera a day before his rights critique. (Associated Press)